Is Chewphobia Ruining Your Life?

Here’s what happens when small, everyday noises ruin your life.

- Charles Bethea

Lunch at the Marriott hotel in Mesa, Arizona, USA, was a south-western buffet of overcooked chicken and soggy enchiladas. I'd recently met a friendly man with a shaved head and a pale oblong face named Paul Tabachneck, so we sat down together at a table to eat. Tabachneck ate carefully, eyes trained on his plate or a spot on the beige walls. But his conversation was lively—he talked about busking as a guitarist in the new York subway [metro] while trying to achieve a dream of being a professional musician. After about 10 minutes, I scraped my knife against my plate while cutting my chicken. Tabachneck whipped his head around to look at me, his eyes suddenly cold.

“Did you have to do that?” he snapped. “And did you know that your jaw pops when you eat?”

We’re all annoyed by annoying sounds: fingernails on chalkboards, car alarms, Fran Drescher’s [American comedian and activist] nasal tones. But for some people, particular sounds send them into an unbearable frenzy. There’s the Atlanta journalist who wanted to reach across the table to strangle his loudly chewing father; the Arizona computer scientist who hated the sound of knives so much that his girlfriend developed a phobia too; the Oregon housewife who moved her family members out of her home so she wouldn’t have to listen to them. Psychologists call them misophones— people with an acute reaction to specific, usually low-volume sounds. But because the condition is poorly understood, they struggle to convince others that their problem isn’t a form of neuroticism. In this hotel, where one of the first scientific conferences on misophonia was being held, the afflicted finally met others of their kind and shared their tales of aural agony. You just had to be very, very careful with your cutlery.